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AP magicians pull vanish act

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and chief executive officer of WND. He is the author or co-author of 13 books that have sold more than 5 million copies, including his latest, "The Restitution of All Things: Israel, Christians, and the End of the Age." Before launching WND as the first independent online news outlet in 1997, he served as editor in chief of major market dailies including the legendary Sacramento Union.

The reporters and editors at the Associated Press, the largest news-gathering organization in the world, have figured out a creative way of making the world’s problems disappear.

Two of the thorniest problems facing America today are illegal immigration and the forceful political creed of Muslims known as Islamism.

So what did the AP do to get our minds off these problems?

Presto, change-o. Abracadabra. The magicians at AP simply pulled off a vanishing act – eliminating these terms from the lexicon.

The result? No more illegal aliens and no more Islamists.

That’s right. Last week the geniuses at AP, which is a powerful, nonprofit cooperative of the newspaper industry, simply banned the use of these terms in its news reports.

Out of sight, out of mind.

If only it were so easy, however, to solve our problems by ignoring them or contriving new euphemisms to obscure them.

Has anything changed as a result?

Of course not. AP knows that. But the political thinking behind this allegedly journalistic decision is not to eliminate real problems in the real world. It is simply to change the way people think – to recondition them, to indoctrinate them, to re-educate them the way totalitarian societies have for hundreds of years.

AP is attempting to reset the terms of debate in what is a political argument in the U.S. It’s taking sides in those debates, as it always does. But this time, it’s eliminating certain language that makes one side in the debate feel uncomfortable.

For instance, let’s look at the term “Islamist.” What does it mean? What’s wrong with it? Let’s got to the dictionary and see.

The World English Dictionary defines the term this way: “Islamist (ˈɪzləmɪst) — adj 1. supporting or advocating Islamic fundamentalism; — n 2. a supporter or advocate of Islamic fundamentalism.”

In other words, this is a real word, with real history and real meaning. “Islamist” is not a term made up by one side in a political debate that requires neutralization. It’s not a subjective or pejorative term. It is what it is – and what it always has been.

But the word police at the AP are uncomfortable with it because the other side in the political debate – the Islamists – don’t like it. The Islamists don’t like being called Islamists, so they lobbied the AP for a change. And they got it.

This is the brand of political correctness that is destroying the free press in America today. And AP is at the forefront of it. AP is not only taking sides in the political debate while pretending to be the primary source of fair and objective news in America for print and broadcast outlets. It is setting the very ground rules and language that can be used to participate in the debate.

This isn’t something new in the news media. It’s been going on as long as I’ve been a part of it – going on 35 years. But it’s on overdrive now. It seems like every day new words are being eliminated from our lexicon by the false guides of multiculturalism.

It’s not only verboten to oppose “Islamism.” It’s not even appropriate to speak its name.

I hope this form of newspeak sounds Orwellian to you, because that’s what it is.

This is the brave new world of language control – which is as dangerous to a free society as gun control.

Don’t fall for it.

Just cancel your newspaper if it relies on the Associated Press for its news. Just turn off the radio when you hear an Associated Press propaganda report come on. Just switch the channel on your TV if you hear AP cited as the source of a report.

It’s the walking dead as a viable, reliable news agency.

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